Entertainment

Can Smartphone Apps Break Your Bad Habits?

At 8 a.m. my smartphone alarm goes off, nearly jolting me out of bed. It displays a short message: “Aim for 30 minutes of exercise today.” Craving another hour of sleep, I duck under the covers, but immediately that thought is replaced by another: “You know, this app actually has a point.” Five minutes later, I’m in my sneakers and out the door.

Juice is one of the apps I downloaded as part of my three-week long experiment to see if my smartphone could help me change my bad habits. I wanted to be fitter, more energetic and more social. I also wanted to eat better and stop spacing out on what I wanted to see at the movies.

There was no science to my selections, although they did have to meet some criteria. They had to be new-ish (i.e., launched in the past year), well-received and strike me as intuitive to use. They also had to be cheap because I’m on a budget.

After much deliberation and searching around online, I settled on five iOS applications: Bloom, which plays short, inspirational videos; The Eatery, where users share and rate photos of meals; Recall ($2.99), a reminder app for cultural recommendations; Juice, an energy, sleep and nutrition tracker; and Lift, a running log of users’ daily habits and progress.

Week 1: Getting Started

Registering for the apps took only a minute at most. Nearly each one, except for Recall, asked for my email, name and Facebook account, the latter of which I haven’t used for almost a year. (Clearly, these apps believed reaching your goals is a group effort.)

Both Juice and Bloom required setting reminders, which was easy for Juice (9 p.m.) but not so much for Bloom, where every single video required one. Scheduling what time I wanted to “Be mindful this morning” or “Reflect on my achievements” seemed counterintuitive, but I went along with it anyway, setting “Random” reminders for Monday through Thursday.

Next up was Lift, where I picked a few habits from menus grouped into categories like health, relationships and finances. I didn’t vow to do anything crazy, just hit the gym and keep up with friends. If I made good on both of those habits, I figured I’d “check in” and write notes like I'd seen other users doing. After setting some notifications for upcoming films I wanted to see in Recall, I got started.

That week I let the apps do their thing, reminding me when to use them and ignoring them when they didn’t. But Juice wasn’t going down without a fight. The app incessantly bugged me to check in, and by the third day, I was admitting to eating a bagel, feeling generally run down and getting lackluster sleep, due to a noisy radiator.

Breakfast, meanwhile, became fraught with tension as I snapped one wheat bagel after another, subjecting myself to the instant—and displeased—feedback on The Eatery. According to my Instagram-style feed, 14 people rated my Zaro’s oat bagel with butter as a solid 52 on a scale of 1 out of 100. I could see my best and worst meals at a glance, including when they were eaten and if I’d made progress. My weekly report showed I hadn’t.

Week 2: Practice Makes Perfect

By now, I was relying on Recall when I visited bookstores and getting accustomed to using Juice nightly. Something else was happening, too. I was starting to regret all those bagels I was eating and dreaded sharing them on The Eatery, where every snapshot came with a side of public shaming. Worse still, I’d received a weekly report from Juice that showed my eating, sleeping and energy had all taken a nosedive since last Friday.

I’d checked in with Lift a few times, but reminding myself to use the app felt pointless— although I’ve learned to set reminders since then—and the plain white interface bored me. I also felt lazy when I ignored it, which happened a lot. I asked David Freedman, contributing editor for The Atlantic and author of “The Perfected Self,” a cover story for the magazine on B.F. Skinner-nodding apps, whether I was wrong to expect more pressure. Skinner, you may recall, was a famous psychologist who said people could "condition" or change their behavior in the right environment.

“I think what you've experienced is something that is commonly experienced by anyone who adopts a vaguely Skinnerian program,” he said. “We've been sort of led to believe this is invasive and leads to unpleasant regimentation, that it's controlling, that it eats into our freedom and we become robots.” But on the contrary, “these apps are building on how the brain works and taking it on in a useful and advantageous way. When we're reinforced then we end up feeling pretty comfortable with it. But on the other hand, really, this does come down to the execution,” and not every app will deliver.

Depending on your level of motivation and personality, some apps will just “click” better than others. And some are better at nudging, like Juice. Though Juice was annoying at first with all its reminders going day and night, I found myself checking in because I realized it wasn’t intrusive at all; it only took a minute or so to use. By Week three, it was part of my daily routine, like taking those morning walks.

The app had other things going for it as well, like not relying on Facebook as The Eatery and Lift seemed to do, although the latter cared less about “following friends” than the former. Juice was also great at incentivizing hard work: Since I could track when I'd exercised and see how well I ate or slept on those days, I quickly realized the benefit of doing it. If I didn't walk that day, chances are I felt pretty lousy. If I did, I probably slept and ate well.

Week 3: New and Improved

While Juice was the clear winner of the experiment, I’d secretly hoped that Bloom would pan out. The truth was, it didn’t alert often enough, and when it did, the videos popped on at inappropriate times, often during nights out. Not that the app knew my schedule, but Freedman noted it could have. Behavioral apps have gotten to the point where they can recognize patterns, such as what sends you on a cookie bender or when you’re watching TV.

“You can design an app so that most people, or at least many people, will really take advantage of [how we think and live] and benefit from it, and [the app] will prompt you for doing the right things and that's something you'll adapt to,” he said.

If you've yet to have that experience, don’t despair. There’s probably an app out there for you somewhere. All it takes is some trial and error, and not getting discouraged when it doesn't work out. It took me five apps, three weeks and a lot of groggy mornings to do it, but I found an app I’ll keep for awhile.

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